RiME 1.02 releasing for Switch February 19, stabilizes FPS, improves visuals and much more

RiME is a fantastic and beautiful game, but it launched on Switch in a pretty terrible state. RiME 1.02 hopes to address that.

After a long period of will-they, won’t-they from Greybox and Tequilaworks, a massive patch has been submitted to, and accepted by Nintendo which will visually enhance the game. The big changes will be in handheld mode, one of the main reasons to own RiME on Switch, and from a few stills posted we have to say this could be a remarkable turnaround.

We said RiME was a delightful experience but has not ported well to Switch in our review.

In their blog post, Greybox admitted ‘we had to make some sacrifices in order to get the game to perofrm and that process took extra development time. Even so, the release of the Switch was not as good as we wanted it to be, and we own that.’

They go on to say. ‘We’ve spent the past few months responding to player feedback, trying to enhance the visual experience of RiME, with the understanding that things like volume streaming hiccups are not something we can address. However, the visual fidelity of the game is something we can address, especially in handheld mode.’

Big difference, right?

Here’s the full patch notes. Suffice it to say, when this drops, we will be revisiting our RiME review with some updated impressions. Based on these updates, it certainly seems worth it.

– Increased visual fidelity, bloom and post-processing

– Sharpened image resolution

– Opening Cinematics visually improved

– Fixed possible stage exploits that would enable players to skip parts of the stages

– Increased texture quality in specific areas

– Increased view distance

– Fixed an issue with foliage density, shadows, and render distances

– Updated texture mipmaps for the Fox

– Improved global mipmaps

– Improved shadow distance and quality

– Fixed instances of foliage pops

– Stabilized FPS

– Optimized the Boys cape and hair physics

– Rebuilt streaming volumes

– Fixed an issue that allowed you to see outside of the map in later stages.

– Updated lighting to prevent bleed through

– Updated the quality of trees in earlier stages where they would display poorly.

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About the author

Ray Willmott

Ray is the founder and editor of Expansive. He is also a former Community Manager for Steel Media, and has written for a variety of gaming websites over the years. His work can be seen on Pocket Gamer, PG.biz, Gfinity, and the Red Bull Gaming Column. He has also written for VG247, Videogamer, GamesTM, PLAY, and MyM Magazine,